The lesson never needs the internet.
Atlas asks for a connection three times, and teaching your child is not one of them.
Atlas needs a connection to install and to sync, but the learning session never touches the network: a child can learn for weeks with the radio off, and a phone that never connects again keeps working exactly the same.
Does Atlas need the internet?
The lesson does not; setup does, once. Those are two different things and we say them separately, because running them together is what makes the promise false.
Setup needs a connection — the account and the first content. After that, learning never needs a signal: not for a lesson, not for a hint, not to check an answer. And when a connection does turn up, Atlas uses it. It never waits for it.
The three moments.
| When | Connection | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Setting it up | Yes, once. | Creating the account and downloading the first content. Designed to finish in one sitting on a bad connection — or at a school or a library that has one. |
| Learning | Never. | Not for a lesson, not for a hint, not to check an answer, not to save progress. Any network call in a session is a bug that fails our build. |
| Syncing and topping up | Whenever there next is one. | Progress goes up, new and re-personalised content comes down. If that is never, Atlas keeps working. |
What does "offline" mean here?
The entire product with no connection — not a downloaded section. Most apps that say "offline" mean a cached slice: a few stories for a plane, while the rest of the product is a wall.
Here it is every lesson, the whole engine, the map and the report. Not a subset, not a mode, not a degraded version. A child can work through months of material without the phone ever finding a signal — and the tutor is making exactly the same decisions it would make on a fibre connection, because the engine that decides lives on the phone rather than on a server.
The phone is the source of truth.
Your child's progress lives on the phone. It is not a cache of something on our server — it is the record, and it stays correct whether we ever hear from it or not.
When a connection appears, it syncs. When one does not, nothing degrades, nothing expires, and nothing is waiting for permission.
What if there is never a signal where we live?
Atlas is designed to arrive anyway, the way things actually arrive in places like that: from a school, from a health post, from a neighbour's phone.
A family with no connection at all still has to get Atlas, and that is the part almost nobody solves. Every content pack is cryptographically signed, so a file handed to you by someone you know can be checked before it is trusted.
If you stop paying, your child keeps learning.
Everything already on the phone keeps working. Indefinitely. Sync and new content pause; the education does not.
There is no kill switch, and there will not be one. A child losing their tutor because a card expired is the exact thing this whole architecture exists to prevent.
It works where you are. And where the signal doesn't.
One email when Atlas opens. Nothing else.